Private equity to buy 20 per cent of AMD

Our well informed industry sources have told us that AMD is about to sell 20 percent of its stake to a private equity outfit called Silver Lake.

Fudzilla got this from multiple, independent industry sources that want to remain anonymous. Silver Lake was the outfit which was behind Michael Dell's take over of his company and has piles of cash.

The company advertises itself as a global leader in technology investing and that have invested money in brands like Alibaba, Avago, GoDaddy,Motorola Solutions, Opera Solutions and many others has prepared to bite the significant part of AMD.

This could be AMD's big break as it will get the money that it desperately needs. AMD has been sinking under financial problems as its CPU roadmap is not that great and it is hard for AMD to compete with Nvidia in the mainstream and entry level graphics market.

AMD stock has been trading at $1.88 and with company’s market cap of just 1.418 billion, this 20 percent would not have cost Silver Lake that much. AMD paid 5.4 billion to buy ATI in 2006.

Hopes are high that a super star CPU designer Jim Keller can put AMD roadmap back in order. He and his talented team have been working for a while on a brand new architecture codenamed Zen, but we don’t expect to see Zen for at least couple more quarters. On the graphics side, the company can compete in the higher end market but it doesn’t really had much new to offer in mainstream and entry level.

We also heard that AMD will do another round of restructuring that will be announced shortly. The company apparently has too many mouths to feed with too little an income.